Is it safe to let tumbleweed upgrade itself “automatically and after rebooting”, as per the settings via KDE Plasma “Software Update” ?
Reading through the forum, I got the impression that nowadays this setting eventually calls “zypper dup”?
Is it safe to let tumbleweed upgrade itself “automatically and after rebooting”, as per the settings via KDE Plasma “Software Update” ?
Reading through the forum, I got the impression that nowadays this setting eventually calls “zypper dup”?
To be sure, juts do zypper dup
as everybody advises.
Define “safe”. If there are some problems you will not see them and probably will not have any information what went wrong (my experience with offline updates using GNOME Software).
It initiates PackageKit offline update. When it comes to performing the actual packages manipulation, PackageKit zypper plugin on Tumbleweed does the equivalent of zypper dup
.
Safe, as in being at least as effective and trouble-free as a “zypper dup” from a terminal could be.
I understand that I won’t be able to see anything going wrong, but that should be the exception to the rule, right? (ie. it should just work in the vast majoriy of the ases)?
Using Discover or Gnome-Software to upgrade Tumbleweed is perfectly fine. They’re both just calling the PackageKit backend.
The only downside to them, is if they run into a problem, the update is just going to fail, because PackageKit doesn’t have a mechanism for prompting the user to manually decide what happens when there’s a problem.
If you’re just using the default repositories, this rarely happens. If you’ve got Packman repos enabled, it happens a bit more often, if you’ve got a bunch of third party repos, all bets are off.
I also have the idea that when you run into problems and ask on the forums for help, the first thing they will say: do a zypper dup
and post that here.
Also there were some very large updates, many packages including things like kernel, kernel modules, systemd and complete Desktop Environments that in fact required to be done with no DE running (multi-user target). Search the forums. I have PackageKit not installed myself, but I am unsure it has a CLI interface to handle that.
It does not. But PackageKit is going to do “offline updates” (I think, I don’t actually run Tumbleweed/Leap, so I don’t interact with it anymore), which negates the issue of having running processes being updated on a running system, and causing your desktop environment to crash while running said update.
(Note, I could be wrong about the offline updates. I seem to recall them working just fine, the last time I actually ran Tumbleweed on my workstation)
pkcli
PackageKit does exactly what you (or frontend you use) tells it. GNOME Software only supports offline updates, there is no other way. Discover can be configured to do either online or offline. pkcli
can do both.
They are working just fine except when they fail. Just like zypper
.
Thank you very much for your insights, gentlemen!
I will use the Plasma automatic offline update on a weekly basis and see how that goes! I will report back if I find my system in serious trouble!
Not many other repositories for now… just packman
I doubt that is useful. People will only tell you to use zypper dup
and that is something you already expected to get.
Sorry, it should have been pkcon
of course.
Indeed. It’s only the situations where zypper expects user interaction to pick a solution / reports a file conflict that Discover doesn’t work.
So am I understanding this correctly?:
Does package kit support passing trough interactive questions and its a limitation of discover to not handle such cases? Or is it a limitation of packagekit?
It does not call zypper
, it is linked to libzypp
(for which zypper
is more or less just an interactive wrapper) and calls into libzypp
to perform the same operation.
To my best knowledge, it is a limitation of PackageKit.
Thanks for the reply! Luckily interactivity is seldom required, except for like packman codexes but those can just be waited out.
I guess the important part here is that PackageKit calls libzypp equivalent of zypper dup
and not zypper up
, right?
Do you know how the offline updates work? Id assume packagekit, libzypp would require a lot of services running, like the network stack, filesystems, the kernel itself but those are all things that often get updated in such transactions?
Edit:
I Just realised while browsing around the KDE system settings that I’m not clear about how the automatic updates work, since the states “updates to software get installed immediately but system upgrades after a reboot” but with distribution updates (zypper dup) there is no such separation possible, no?
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